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During 2003 and 2004 UKCIA became aware of several incidents of censorship by public institutions; namely libraries and the BBC. The reason given in all the cases was "filtering to ensure websites are family friendly", however, no explanation of what this means as far as we are concerned was ever given. Some libraries use filtering which simply blocks "drugs" websites, although or course this never includes Talk to Frank or websites approved or run by the government. UKCIA is easy to contact and we would always respond to any reasonable concerns regarding content unsuitable for children or any other serious concern, but no such approach to us has ever been made. We have no idea when this censorship happened, we only learned about it in the case of libraries by being told by people who tried to view UKCIA and found it blocked. It was when we did a campaign which wasn't found by the BBC search engine, but was prominent on all the other search engines, that we noticed what the BBC was up to. It's almost certain UKCIA was blocked to large sections of the British public during the time of reclassification in January 2004. As the website of the legalise cannabis campaigns, UKCIA is integral to the debate regarding cannabis in the UK. What is happening can only be regarded as censorship. September 2004 - Censored by the BBC Since August, UKCIA had been running a feature about a leaflet called "Hayzy Dayz", issued by the government's Talk to Frank campaign. Throughout August and into September, this item had featured at or near the first hit on all the search engines if you did a search for "hayzy dayz". However, it didn't feature at all on the BBC search engine. It wasn't easy to contact the BBC about this, a search of the website failed to turn up a phone number or even an e-mail address. A call to the local BBC studios in Norwich was the start of a couple of near fruitless hours on the phone, calling numbers in London. The BBC switchboard had no idea where to send us. Eventually someone took a message and to our surprise, the BBC did phone back. This resulted in a letter from the BBCi Editorial and Information Team, which you can read here - a private address is blacked out on the scan of the letter. It's quite an astounding reply to a serious complaint, not least because the letter confirmed UKCIA had been deliberately blocked by a decision taken within the BBC rather than by the use of third party software. This gave us a ref number - 10398637 and a call to the number given gave an e-mail address. Our reply was sent by both e-mail and by snail mail (read here), the response was as near to immediate as possible, and we were unblocked. - BBC reply - read here. Note there is no apology, much less an explanation. As of September 2004, now we're unblocked, UKCIA is the number one search result on the BBC search engine out of 455,278 search results for "cannabis". It is shown behind the Talk to Frank government website's page on cannabis as the BBC has chosen to "recommend" it, along with a House of Lords report and a New Scientist article. UKCIA was the number one genuine result. It's difficult to draw any other conclusion from this other than the BBC deliberately censored us from its search engine, the other 455,-odd thousand sites were all there. We have been informed that as of September 2004, some libraries are still censoring UKCIA from their public access terminals. November 2003 - censored by libraries Some libraries in the eastern counties of the UK were found to be blocking access to UKCIA by means of webfiltering. This seems to have come about because a closed group of local government officers at county council level have assumed the right to decide what subject areas can be allowed on their library computers to which the pubic have access. The basis for the decision seems to be that drugs are illegal, therefore sites discussing illegal drugs are also in some way illegal. "Protection of children", as usual, was used to justify this censorship. The authorities we've dealt with, Essex and Northampton agreed that UKCIA is a legitimate campaign site. Northampton were able to unblock us themselves and apparently did so, but Essex was not able to unblock us. UKCIA approached the webfiltering company and managed to get them to remove us from their list of banned websites. We
are tried to establish the extent of this web censoring and who
has the authority to decide which subjects should be censored, but
we didn't get very far. This authority seems to have been assumed
by local government officers and no method of accountability seems
to have been provided. We are also trying to find how to appeal,
but there doesn't seem to be a way. True, unaccountable censorship.
Confirmation of change of category from SmartFilter 15th November 2003 E-mail sent to Information Services Manager at Essex County Council 16th November 2003 Reply from Information Services manager 20th November 2003 E-mail from UKCIA to department of Culture, Media and Sport 23/11/2003 The original item from UKCIA November 2003
This was happening because the council has taken the decision to ban access to websites which carry information about the use and sale of illegal drugs, even though such sites are not illegal in this country. Indeed, any site which supports harm reduction will carry that sort of information. This decision was taken by a sub committee of the strangely named "Peoples network project board" and seemingly never challenged or checked. If that policy were properly enforced, the governments "Talk to Frank" site would be banned. It should be noted that this ban only applies to libraries in Essex and not schools, so whilst Essex children are permitted to see drugs information sites, adults aren't.
Fortunately, following an e-mail from UKCIA Smartfilter have realised their mistake and will move UKCIA from the "Drugs, politics/religion" category to "'politics/religion/opinion" and so UKCIA will again be available in Essex when the change takes effect. But UKCIA isn't the only site being censored by Essex CC. At the time of writing the LCA is blocked as is the Dutch language version of Drugtext, although not the English version. Most of the smaller sites aren't blocked because they're not listed on Smartfilter's database. UKCIA will try to establish on what grounds Essex decided to censor access to sites such as UKCIA and what parameters they have set for doing so. We'll also try to find which sites are censored, although there's no way they can have a clue about that. UKCIA will be available in Essex libraries again from November 18th
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